On Remembering in the Twenty-First Century.

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As I turned to washed my hands in the third floor bathroom of my 1920′s Georgian mansion-turned-office building, I saw the most beautiful shadow I’ve ever noticed. Maybe an odd place to contemplate beauty and life, but nonetheless, I was fascinated as I watched the evening sun play with the leaves and the arch of the window.

I had the sudden, second-nature instinct to video it or snap a photo, to find a way to keep it forever. The quick darting movement of the branches and the light as they swung back and forth against each other reminded me of those moving photos people keep making now, those series of two or three photos that make it look like a stop-action illustration.
In an instant, I saw it: the reaction to a reaction to a reaction. Art that imitates life that imitates art that imitates life.
Sometimes I love technology and everything that we can do with it to capture the world we live in. Without photos, some memories, both the important and the mundane, would be lost forever. Without video, we might forget things like what a loved one’s voice sounds like, or the way your grandmother’s dining room looked with everyone gathered around it as you blew out your candles out on your third birthday. Those moments would die with us. They would flicker and disappear like a beautiful but rather nondescript early September day.
As a writer I’m repeatedly struck with the urge to write things down, to transcribe every moment, every thought, every conversation. I don’t want to lose it, this moment that feels so pivotal and poignant. I’m afraid that I’ll forget, and that all these things that seem so necessary will slip through my fingers and that I will reach the end, not knowing who I am or how I got here.
But if I have to record it for it to last, was it ever that important?
And what will happen to our perception of lives lived?
I fear that if I’m only blogging and tweeting and photographing and documenting the happy things, the funny things, that I’ll look back on life with a false sense of reality, believing that things were less painful than they really were. Or that I will be wracked with an unidentifiable emptiness and disconnect to periods of my life that were filled with hardship, because only half of it is visible.
In our flurry to document and text and tweet and Facebook and Instagram it all, maybe instead of creating a new facet of permanence to our lives, we are instead losing our ability to remember and forget naturally, to live independent of the collective conscious, to appreciate a fleeting moment for the bittersweet thing that it is.

I took the photo anyway.

Apocalypse Now, Baby.

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Not really. Well, maybe.
Actually, let me just say,
1. I do believe a rapture and apocalypse will occur as it is written in Scripture.
2. I do believe in Jesus and believe that He came to give life in all its fullness, and that people who reject His love will be left behind in the event that He does return to earth.
But is He coming tomorrow, as fringe “believers” have predicted? Most likely not. God doesn’t really adhere to human schedules or man-made mathematical schemes imposed on Scripture to calculate Jesus’ return. And even if He did, would we be left behind simply because we disagreed on the day and the hour? No.
Even so, I find it fascinating to listen to radio hosts discuss what they would do with their last days on earth, and read about friends on Facebook planning a rapture party, and seeing tweets about what people would do if the world were to end tomorrow. What would we do if we knew the end was coming?
All week I’ve been meaning to write a post for you folks, but the words have been halting, at times snarky and depressed, and other times the words have flown freely into a form that I love, but that I think might best be reserved for a time when they aren’t so stinging and sad. Have you ever struggled with that, friends? You write down a good story – a true story – and then realize that if anyone reads it, no matter how well written, it could cause more pain than it’s worth?
I realize that many writers don’t trouble themselves with this. After all, it’s the truth. But deep within me, the part of me that is more than a writer, but a daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, a niece, a wife, a friend, knows that it does indeed matter. Some subjects are better left alone. Or perhaps they are better saved for another space and time, like a novel that critics and historians may suspect to be partially auto-biographical, but the writer has no comment on the matter, or maybe left behind in a journal that the writer hopes no one will ever do the dishonor of reading, even in death.
Maybe I should invest in invisible ink.
I could just leave those thoughts in my head, but they take up a lot of room.
I am often caught up in what I should be saying, but I think that it’s also important and all too often overlooked to decide what should be left unsaid. I’ve reached the end of this week, having left the pieces I wrote unpublished. And let me tell you, as hard as it was to decide to leave it alone, I’m thankful I did. I’ve left tomorrow unencumbered by an irreversible choice.
And so, the only thing I have left to say at the end of a long week and the day before what probably isn’t the end of the world, is live your life with intention. 
 
I have this terrible habit of skipping to the end of my books and reading the last pages. It’s a control issue and my shrink and I are working through it…. :)
Really, though. It’s incredibly frustrating that I can’t live life that way. Just a sneak peak would be really helpful when I have absolutely no sense of how to handle life. But since I can’t I am learning that to live with the not knowing, to be at peace with the yet unportrayed ending, means that I am forced to live within the moment I’m given. I have to choose my words and actions with intention.
No one knows how and when and where their life is going to end – we each comprehend this in our own sense. Maybe your parent has a terminal illness or your best friend died in an accident or you just lost your grandparent or you’re fighting for your own life. In any case, take time to enjoy this moment, when you’re here and capable of intentionally loving and living your life.
Have a good weekend, friends.